“There’s nothing out here in the Antelope Valley that could be considered a good wage,” said Christine Martinez, another Rite Aid worker. “You start at minimum wage and don’t go up.”
It’s little wonder that workers started thinking about a union – the company left them little alternative. “A lot of people think unions get organized over wages, and that’s part of it,” according to Warner. “But our main reasons were the working conditions, which are appalling and unreasonable. You almost feel like you’re a slave, even though you’re getting paid for it. And as for job security, we have none.”
At their first meetings over three years ago, Warner and her coworkers talked over those conditions and began to organize a committee to spread the word. They got in touch with the ILWU, whose experienced organizers encourage workers to make the basic decisions about their own campaign.
If EFCA had been passed and signed when it was first introduced, it would have been in effect while those meetings were going on in the warehouse. Warner and the other union committee members could have begun asking their coworkers to sign union cards. When they got a majority, they could have presented the cards to the NLRB. The company would then have been obligated to recognize the union.
But EFCA didn’t pass, and Bush wouldn’t have signed it if it had. So Rite Aid workers had a far different experience.
As soon as the company understood that its workers were organizing, it adopted the all-out, scorched-earth hostility common among most private-sector employers facing organizing drives. Its opposition at the Lancaster warehouse was in fact very different from the attitude the company took towards unions in its stores. In New York City Rite Aid even signed an agreement with SEIU Local 1199 to recognize the union based on the same card-check process it rejected in Lancaster.
Yet, company strategy at the warehouse, according to workers, rested on identifying, isolating and terminating pro-union employees and scaring the rest.
It began when three workers testified at a hearing to decide who would be able to vote in a union election. One was suspended and the other two were written up. The scariest experience came when union supporters began to get fired. First four lost their jobs for small disciplinary infractions.
Then Mike Frescas was terminated after he spoke at a union meeting. Managers and security guards in red shirts hustled him out of the warehouse without even giving him a reason. Christine Martinez, who suffers from arthritis, was canned for not making her production quota.
The ILWU filed charges with the NLRB, accusing the company of firing people for their union activity, a serious violation of federal law. After a long investigation, the NLRB announced it was ready to issue a complaint against Rite Aid, specifying 49 separate violations of the National Labor Relations Act. Included were the illegal suspensions and discipline directed against Sylvia Estrada, Joey Celaya, Lorena Ortiz and Tim Patrick. Other counts included charges that Rite Aid managers had illegally tried to stop workers from asking each other to sign union cards, that General Manager Gary Konopka had said he’d deny wage increases if the union came in, and had asked employees to report on union activity, and that several managers had threatened employees for their union activity. Konopka was charged also with offering to finance a committee of workers to conduct anti-union activity, and with telling workers that the initiative in forming that committee came from employees, not from the company.
But then the board offered to settle the charges without filing a complaint, if the company agreed to rehire two of the workers, Ignacio Mesa and Deborah Fontaine. The company agreed. The board required the company to post a notice as well, but Rite Aid didn’t even have to admit that it had broken the law – just to promise that it wouldn’t do so in the future. ILWU organizer Carlos Cardon points out that “although [Mesa and Fontaine] got back pay, there was really no penalty on the employer for what had happened. The way things are set up, it’s like robbing the bank and getting caught, but the only penalty is that you have to put the money back. Nothing happens to them.” In fact, companies forced to rehire workers are even entitled to deduct any unemployment payments they receive while they’re fired.
